It’s been a long time, friends. Perhaps too long. I’ve recently begun working on contributing to a friend’s blog about video gaming. What do I know about video gaming? Nowhere near as much as he does, but I’m apparently better with writing blog content than he is. 😳🤣
What I DO know is books, which is the reason I started this in 2012. Along with the other 8 or 9 blogs that I write for. Bookselling affords me the opportunity to sell books in person; I guess the blog afforded me the opportunity to help you find books on the Internet. And again, they tell me they like my unconventional writing. They being the marvelous 2,762 of you who follow this blog. As always, I thank you. On a personal note, after my father passed in 2019, I really lost my mojo with writing. It’s only been since spring of this year that the light of inspiration revisited me again. I took another gig on at work, social media denizen. Unfortunately, I do not get to write as much content as I would like, so it’s back to blogging and hoping something comes along that allows me to dip my toe in the pool again. Until then? You poor bastards have to read my reviews again.
This book seemed like a slam dunk for someone like me who inhales 80’s anything the way Snoop Dogg inhales the ganja. I read the book Dylan Jones wrote on David Bowie and really enjoyed that. Comparing the two is like comparing ashes to a well done steak. This book is not that book.
Going inside the world of the late 1970’s punk scene to the New Romantic movement is an exhaustive project. It may have been too much for Jones. The list of luminaries brought into the project is impressive, including the dearly departed, among them George Michael, Malcolm McLaren, and Prince, who is likened to ” a Cobb salad in the studio”. Don’t get me started on that.
While the music scene is examined, the fashion, the clubs and nightclub scene are also examined and psychoanalyzed, along with magazines and that long-defunct music television shuttle, MTV. The fascinating psychology behind the egocentric clashes of pop titans take up more of the book than someone who is a pop junkie like myself can take. A full third- the first part- of the book is just trashing the Clash. Most of it by that rascal McLaren, some by other bands. Then you have McLaren vs Adam Ant, McLaren Vs John Lydon, etc. It could have been a video game, McLaren Vs. (Fill in the blank) for Atari, the amount of the book his battles take up. It got so distractable that it was hard to Simon up enthusiasm to read the last part of it. I wish the pseudo pop psychology could have taken a back seat and more of the good times examined. You bring Adam Ant into the book to discuss the Ants and when McLaren dicked him over, then the next time you see him is Live Aid, where his performance is summarily dismissed, and Class Dismissed! No mention of the 4 albums that he made that were seated on the Top 20 Billboard album chart. It boggles the mind. Madonna gets a third of a paragraph but Sade gets almost a whole chapter. Now, don’t get me wrong- I love Sade but she is not on Madonna’s level here in the States during the 80s. What else disturbed me? There were grammatical errors all over the place and Jones made a huge error calling Chicago DJ Steve Dahl a Detroit DJ. Nope, definitely not. You would think that they had edited it before publishing it, but I guess not.
The book has definite moments- any John Lydon quote is entertainment value worth its weight in gold, Boy George’s contribution to the scene is faithfully recounted, and it was nice to see Spandau Ballet recount their role through the eyes of founder Gary Kemp. But they really sliced in half the following bands- Eurythmics, Depeche Mode, Erasure, OMD, Pet Shop Boys (Neil Tennant is around, but mostly recounting his journalistic career with British magazines, not much on the music side)..none are really represented, just mentioned as a come-what-may shrug. Which made me shake my head some more.
As someone who likes to read music bios, I would say this one leaves a lot of ground untread.
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